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Friday, June 2, 2006

Cyborg Brain A Reality

For the first time, scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich have coupled living brain tissue to a chip equivalent to the chips that run computers.

The scientists in Martinsried developed a revolutionary noninvasive technique that enables them to record neural communication between thousands of nerve cells in the tissue of a brain slice with high spatial resolution. This technique involves culturing razor-thin slices of the hippocampus region on semiconductor chips.